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Ask HN: Hiring managers, what tech skills will you be hiring for in 2017?

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Re: Ask HN: Hiring managers, what tech skills will you be hiring for in 2017?

#221

Post by j_s »

beachstartup wrote: post #106
tomne wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That pitch is great, if rarely seen. My job entails emergencies from time to time, and it's rewarding to solve an issue at the customer, before it gets out of hand, while still solving problem on the long-term roadmap during the day. What I do regret is the complete lack of remote, meaning I will pretty much leave this job soon, as my fiancée is currently living on the other side of the planet. It's great to see comp…

> Are you still looking for applicants? i don't recruit on hn. i will say this though: most people like you, if given the opportunity to work for a smaller, unknown firm for less money remotely, and a larger well known 'famous' firm for more money on-site, they will usually choose the latter even if they really want to work remotely. in other words, "i want to work remotely" usually really means, "i wish i had all th…

I can see why HN would trend towards the "don't wants".

Are you willing to share any communities or other resources you do use for recruiting? No pressure at all here, just curious.

Re: Ask HN: Hiring managers, what tech skills will you be hiring for in 2017?

#222

Post by ryandrake »

mullsork wrote: post #217
ryandrake wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know--It looks to me that people have a very, very narrow view of "competence" then. When you define a role so narrowly, with so many requirements and conditions, don't be surprised when you reject 399 out of 400 resumes, and don't call it a shortage of talent.

I won't bite on the "talent" part as that's obviously hard as hell to spot. Someone can seem entirely incompetent yet sitting on talent that hasn't been nurtured yet. What I do see and hear about are people that simply do not know how to program. FizzBuzz generally cuts out 50% or something out of the pool right? So that's 200 of those 400 resumes out the window already. If you can't pass FizzBuzz then I think it's s…

Old thread, but I'd like to point out that I don't think filtering out people who can't do FizzBuzz is "picky". What I'm calling picky is the extremely narrowly defined sets of skills people in this thread are looking for. There is a huge gulf between "competent programmer" and "expert in language A, platform B, and framework C". Most companies would be perfectly fine with the former (of which there is no shortage) and reject a lot of good candidates in a sometimes futile search for the latter.

Re: Ask HN: Hiring managers, what tech skills will you be hiring for in 2017?

#223

Post by eganist »

fma wrote: post #210
eganist wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nice. If your background is strong in automation engineering, you can frankly probably get an appsec engineer position at most decent in-house shops right now just because so many of them are trying to avoid relying on consultants for pentests and assessments. One of the larger challenges right now at most firms building out internal appsec programs is to get to a point where security-focused static code analysis and…

I wasn't aware that was a big problem. My company is a large corporate company and I feel we lag behind a lot of things. However we have automated static code analysis through HP Fortify. It points to our build, scans and reports are generated automatically. Someone on the app security team needs to run the HP Webscan for pen test. I'm a senior developer and I made a name for myself when we started having the require…

Some mature orgs have done a good job of automating this, but it really depends on the industry. Finance and FinTech, for instance, are ahead of the curve here. Most government entities on the other hand don't even realize there's a curve ahead, as do many utilities companies and some healthcare firms. So to your point about it being a big problem, "it depends on the company."

As for strong developers in the appsec world, certainly. Especially if you have a strength in the automation side, you can easily carve a niche out for yourself. The main two areas where I can see a dev taking charge are in driving the use of security features in frameworks product teams already use (this is a HUGE bullet being pushed by notables in AppSec as it reduces the effort involved in uptake of secure coding practices) as well as in leading automation of new tooling in support of new frameworks. There's also the angle of developing custom solutions to address firm-specific problems, something appsec people without a strict development background will have a hard time doing.

Quite a few appsec leads prefer bringing in developers with a breaker mindset in as appsec hires, so yes, there's always room. Depending on how you answer the question "what does 'secure ~10 webapps' mean?", you can probably easily score a lateral move into AppSec (Senior Dev -> Senior Security Engineer or Senior AppSec Consultant/Engineer).

My keybase profile has all my contact info if you want more tailored guidance. Even if you don't join my firm or any of the other firms I have a hand in shepherding, we desperately need more people in appsec, so I'm all about sharing this knowledge.

Re: Ask HN: Hiring managers, what tech skills will you be hiring for in 2017?

#224

Post by asher »

thinkmassive wrote: post #211
asher wrote: post #37

I'm at shopkick. We're a mobile app. We hire server, Android and iPhone engineers, but many will move across these platforms. We look for smart generalists. So, although we use Python on our servers, we don't expect server candidates to know Python. Advice for senior engineers: brush up your practical programming. If you've been in an architect/leadership role, you may be rusty. Make sure you're comfortable on both w…

Everything you said jives with me, with the exception of emacs. I know it's a religious topic to some, but I have to ask... do you regularly see servers without vi, but with emacs installed?

I guess I phrased that wrong - I think server candidates should know vi or emacs. No need for both.

Re: Ask HN: Hiring managers, what tech skills will you be hiring for in 2017?

#225

Post by z3t4 »

eropple wrote: post #196
z3t4 wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

all variables in JS are private. Nodejs module require's are private in method scope. all modules in nodejs are open souece, when you find a bug you make a pull request. Popular modules are used by many, bugs tend to surface quickly. Semver versioning is used, so its usually safe to upgrade minor (bug fixes)

I'm not sure if you were building a case towards something, but I definitely don't get where you're going. Variables being private or not-private is not particularly meaningful to encapsulation while exports are relying on underscore-conventions to protect your internal state. Modules being open-source or not is not particularly relevant to either question, nor is semver when your transitive dependencies don't upgrad…

All variables except those in the global scope are private, so you do not need underscore-conventions, simply do not declare the variable in the global scope! And when it comes to nodeJS modules, there are no global scope, all variables will be private unless explicitly exported. So instead of obj.__foo you just declare foo somewhere and it will not be possible to get or set it outside the module.

Since all variables are private (function) scoped in JS you do not have to worry about shadowing (overwriting variables), especially when your functions don't have any outside couplings, witch is possible with (common JS) NodeJS modules as modules can be required from within functions or methods. They are just like any variable.

I think I'll have to make a blog post to explain it in more detail. And I encourage you to do the same ...

What do you mean by transitive dependencies ? I don't think there's a concept of transitive dependencies in NodeJS.

If you spend one hour to fix a bug in a open source project, you have probably saved other people thousands of hours of work, money, or frustration. Software is special as it cost very little to copy code, so your one hour contribution can be copied many times creating a lot of value. It's like you would bake one cake once and it could be eaten many times, over and over again.

Re: Ask HN: Hiring managers, what tech skills will you be hiring for in 2017?

#226

Post by devilsavocado »

eganist wrote: post #5

So given that I may likely be hiring in the web and mobile application security spaces again next year (I've _somehow_ filled all of my open positions this year; appsec is difficult to fill with external hires), I'm focusing specifically on three skills: • ability to assess tech/architecture risks in apps • experience in devops automation ("secdevops" if you will) • proven skill in communication regardless of depth T…

What counts as 'proven skill in communication' to you? Other than how they communicate throughout the interview process, I'm not sure how else to test for this.

Re: Ask HN: Hiring managers, what tech skills will you be hiring for in 2017?

#227

Post by bornwithabeard »

ClassyJacket wrote: post #112
brongondwana wrote: post #85

FastMail in Melbourne is going to be hiring for skills in three languages: middleware (Perl), frontend (Javascript) and support (English) early next year. It's not so much specific tech skills as attitude. We're strong on pragmatism with a touch of pride in doing it right. Pragmatism without that pride in quality leads to hacks that are unmaintainable - obsession over perfect without pragmatism leads to never deliver…

Do you have any insight what it's like getting into this industry here in Melbourne? I've been teaching myself JavaScript and built a functional, interactive site. But speaking to an agency yesterday, they said they wouldn't even consider looking at anything for me where I hadn't worked for a couple of years already. Chicken and egg problem. This website seems to be mostly Californians. (Maybe I need to hang out on W…

I would definitely suggest getting along to MelbJS nights - aside from the fact that there's some good folks and great talks, there's usually a bunch of people who will advertise what roles their companies are usually hiring for.

also, make sure your portfolio site is up to date and has lots of projects that you're working on.

If you've got no commercial experience I wouldn't really recommend going to an agency, mostly because agencies are too expensive for companies if you're just going to hire juniors - plus there's usually no shortage of junior devs, especially this time of year.

Re: Ask HN: Hiring managers, what tech skills will you be hiring for in 2017?

#228

Post by thinkmassive »

asher wrote: post #224
thinkmassive wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everything you said jives with me, with the exception of emacs. I know it's a religious topic to some, but I have to ask... do you regularly see servers without vi, but with emacs installed?

I guess I phrased that wrong - I think server candidates should know vi or emacs. No need for both.

Yeah that makes sense. I would say that everyone should know enough vi to get by, even if it's not their editor of choice, although I suppose there's _usually_ nano or pico.

After I posted my previous response I realized that I actually know a few emacs keybindings thanks to tmux, even though I've never used the editor. I use a lightly modified vim on my laptop, but I think it's best to learn enough of the defaults (of any application/utility) to speed up your workflow on a new host.

Re: Ask HN: Hiring managers, what tech skills will you be hiring for in 2017?

#229

Post by beachstartup »

j_s wrote: post #221
beachstartup wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Are you still looking for applicants? i don't recruit on hn. i will say this though: most people like you, if given the opportunity to work for a smaller, unknown firm for less money remotely, and a larger well known 'famous' firm for more money on-site, they will usually choose the latter even if they really want to work remotely. in other words, "i want to work remotely" usually really means, "i wish i had all th…

I can see why HN would trend towards the "don't wants". Are you willing to share any communities or other resources you do use for recruiting? No pressure at all here, just curious.

well, most people check craigslist, no matter what their station in life/career.

Re: Ask HN: Hiring managers, what tech skills will you be hiring for in 2017?

#230

Post by thrwythrwy »

fatihdonmez wrote: post #109

Here at Agoda, we're looking for great engineers. It'll be wonderful if you also know any of Scala, Akka, Cassandra, Kafka, Hadoop, Spark. You can apply here; http://grnh.se/p4tu8l1

Can you share the salary range?
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